Project Year 9 Local Area Postcard Designs
The next project that my Year 9 Multimedia Students got to create a was a postcard. We discussed how a postcard is an object that a town can use to advertise itself to encourage people to visit as well as deliver the senders message. The students had to create their postcards using Adobe Photoshop and use the postcard template from the VistaPrint website.
We practiced a few of the techniques that I thought the students would need in the lead up to the task. The video below taught them how to put an image inside text in Adobe Photoshop.
We researched, discussed and analysed a number of existing postcard designs and broke the elements down in terms of their visual weight and the overall visual hierarchy of the postcards. Put simply, visual weight is how heavy an element is, such as the main text on the front of a postcard as an example. Visual hierarchy is the order of importance of each element and is determined by how much visual weight each element has.
The task itself was to create the front and back of the postcards. The front had to include a landscape photo that they took themselves with some colour adjustments and some text. The back had to have a stamp placeholder a texture overlay or silhouette and a custom shape.
Some of the postcards had a real retro feel to them as when we looked at various postcard designs from Google Images many of the examples were from the 80’s. What I thought was really neat was that a lot of the students postcards ended up with this retro look! Some students had a bit of fun with the task by creating a satirical message. I originally said no when a student asked if they could use satire but I then thought to myself, “why not”. Who am I to deny their creative freedom anyway?